


This Is Home

by Re_White



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst and Humor, M/M, Multi, Tarsus IV, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-28
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 21:43:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/230158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Re_White/pseuds/Re_White
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bones slides his forearms through the bars and leans his forehead against the iron, hair mussed, crooked smile full of dirty possibilities. “Aw, pookey, could just say ya missed us.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Hot Mess

Part One: A Hot Mess

Stardate: 2245

Kodos chooses them because they are special.

That is what he says when Jim survives another simulation, when Carol vomits blood and Thomas starts seeing things, when Gary screams as his eyes turn silver and Kevin assembles a sub-space communicator with two broken fingers - when Lenore poisons the guard in their fifth attempt at escape.

Through the guilt, hunger, and needles, Kodos tells them they are the future.

oOo

Stardate: 2260

Time: 0445

 _Truly_ , Captain Jim Kirk thinks as he is ushered through the police station to the holding cells _truly, this is the best of all possible worlds._

His uniformed escort, a young Andorian officer with an obvious limp and a warp drive equation scribbled in bright pink across his face, abandons Jim half way down the hall. Jim would like to think that's because he's imposing and deeply authoritative. But it's probably just the growing stench. Stale beer, wet gutter, and the sour tinge of sweat – the offensive, universally recognized stink of those who were up to no good and too stupid not to get caught doing it.

Jim breathes through his mouth and takes stock of the carnage.

Slumped like road kill and rapidly grossifying in their own funk, are his senior bridge crew in various states of unconsciousness and undress. Chekov is slumped against Sulu in nothing but his Starfleet regulation underwear, a pink felt tip pen tucked jauntily behind his ear. The entire left side of Sulu's face is caked in a blue smear of suspicious origin. Scotty is sprawled face down on the floor, knees in and ass up. It's vaguely obscene. Uhura is on Spock's lap, face plastered to his neck, snoring wetly. Her boots are gone along with five inches of hair. Spock, of course, is pristine which does absolutely nothing to offset the horrifying reality of his quiet singing as he gently pets Uhura's back, totally oblivious to the eight kinds of ick on her uniform.

And then there's Bones. Shit-faced and drooling, Bones is ridiculously fuckable, and Jim makes a firm decision not to notice that.

Moving on.

“Good _morning_ , assholes!” Jim's singsong greeting is met with moans, and whimpering – a general cacophony of despair. This is right and proper.

Bones' gravely voice surfaces amongst the groans of blossoming hangovers. “Oh, fuck. Jim, use your inside voice.”

Spock and Chekov are the only ones able to bring themselves to stand at attention. Jim appreciates the gesture, even if the effect is dampened somewhat by Chekov's lack of pants and Spock still holding Uhura, who has yet to grace him with her consciousness. Sulu just stares at Chekov, obviously distracted by the no pants situation.

Scotty grunts, roles over, and scratches himself.

“You all suck,” Jim announces. “I want you to know that. I fought tooth and nail to get every one of you on my awesome ship. I bribed, flirted and maybe groped a couple people I'm not proud of -”

“Classy, Jim.”

“And this is the thanks I get? You get arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct – on _Risa_? How is that even possible?”

Bones slides his forearms through the bars and leans his forehead against the iron, hair mussed, crooked smile full of dirty possibilities. “Aw, pookey, could just say ya missed us.”

“That's _Captain_ Pookey, and fuck you, I could be sleeping right now. Someone explain to me why I am not sleeping right now.”

Silence. Unless he counts Uhura, who mumbles something uncouth in Klingon.

“Erm.”

“What's that, Lieutenant Sulu? I couldn't hear you over all the stalling.”

Sulu blanches and makes an obvious attempt to man up. “It was...” He pauses, face contorting into lines that signify anxiety, which is interesting because Sulu doesn't generally register feelings that fall on the bitch end of the emotional spectrum. “It was the crew of the Valiant. Sir”

And just like that his tongue-tied crew erupts into noise. Honestly, it's like being yelled at by a drunk, six-headed toddler.

The USS Valiant is crewed by dicks and its captain is their one true prophet. Jim hates that guy like he hates Andorian porn and phasers aimed at his crotch. Four months into their commission Starfleet sent the Enterprise on a cooperative mission with the Valiant to Ferenginar. Pike had neatly summed up the eight-page mission statement by telling Jim that there came a time in every star ship captain's life when he had to shake his ass for a mutually beneficial trade agreement. At the time Jim had truly believed a week of negotiation with the galaxy's best hustlers was totally worth hearing Pike talk about Jim's ass.

It was not.

They arrived in the middle of a women's suffrage movement. And plague. It was an infectious disaster wrapped in feminist rage and Captain Esteban was a tool who called Jim “son” and commed Starfleet Command for clearance every five minutes. Just in case his balls started getting any funny ideas about initiative. Sulu called Captain Esteban the Anti-Kirk.

Jim called him an asshole.

The highlight of the mission had been watching Bones drop trou on the bridge and instruct the Valiant's CMO to kiss his goddamn ass, please and thank you. Captain Esteban had demanded that Jim throw Bones in the brig for insubordination, to be followed swiftly by a court martial.

In retrospect, “Blow me,” probably hadn't been the most diplomatic response.

Things had deteriorated from there. Between the two crews, they had racked up forty-nine reprimands and filed sixty individual complaints against one another. Somewhere around having to pry Scotty off of the Valiant's Chief Engineer and cock blocking the Prime Directive for the sake of Ferengi gender equality, Pike had more or less pissed himself laughing and stopped answering Jim's calls.

“- beam something right up his arse.”

Jim startles and points at Scotty. “ _No_.” This is his serious voice. “No ass beaming, Scotty. We've talked about this.”

“Their behavior is unbecoming of Starfleet officers.”

Bones snorts. “Not that I'm disagree'n here, slim, but you're in a jail cell with a half-naked juvenile.”

“You shut up. And you," Jim turns his attention to his first officer, funneling as much seething accusation as possible into his index finger,“What the fuck are you doing here? I seem to recall leaving you on the bridge.”

It strikes Jim as unfair that even while holding his unconscious girlfriend, surrounded by filth and debased drunks, Spock can assume a posture of dignified disdain. “Lieutenant Uhura commed at 2100 requesting the presence of a senior officer to ensure that matters did not escalate beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior.”

There is a pause, right before Spock's face projects the kind of emphatic blankness that sets off all of Jim's internal bullshit alarms. “I was also informed that Commander Simon van Gelder was present.”

The Valiant's first officer is a squirrelly, beady-eyed lunatic laboring under the delusion that Spock is secretly a Romulan. Jim's pretty sure that every time Spock tells him to “Live long and prosper”, what he actually means is “Go die in a fire,” which is kind of awesome.

Scotty fixes Jim with a grave stare. “Don'nae be cross, Capt'n. Daffy bastard had it comin'.”

“Had what coming?”

Bones looks way too smug for someone who smells that much like dumpsters and shame. “A thong, some rope and a little public humiliation.”

Yeah, okay. Jim turns to Chekov, who has started doing math on Sulu's shoulder, not at all concerned with the rampant nudity.

Jim knows this question is ridiculous before he even asks it. “Where are your clothes?”

Chekov smiles somewhat dreamily at him.

Sulu perks up. “He gave them to a stripper.”

There is a moment of profound silence while Jim's brain flatly refuses to process that bit of information.

“I am very disappointed in all of you. ”

Sulu grins, blue goo flaking at the edge of his upturned mouth. “We TP'd their shuttle.”

Jim is slightly less disappointed in them.

oOo

Herding the bridge crew out of jail and back to the shuttle is a very special adventure. It's like trying to get drunk cats to walk in a straight line. Bones and Scotty start singing almost immediately and make several abortive attempts to walk and waltz at the same time. Chekov keeps wandering away to do ridiculously complex math with his pink felt tip pen. Even on Risa, it's weird when a mostly naked teenage genius starts drawing algorithms on people's foreheads so Jim orders Sulu to carry him. He does. Piggyback style.

Jim doesn't trust any of them not to set fire to themselves or something expensive, so he sets the auto control on the shuttle craft and sits with them for the trek back up to the Enterprise. He gets there in time to catch Chekov peering speculatively at the blue glob on Sulu's face.

“Do not lick him. You don't know where he's been.”

Scotty laughs so hard he starts snorting uncontrollably. Matters escalate when he snatches Chekov's pen and Sulu attempts to retrieve it. There's cursing and an inspired use of a roll of toilet paper that Jim didn't even know they had. He refuses to speculate on where they were hiding it.

Spock is no goddamn help at all. He just cradles Uhura who wakes up as they break atmosphere. Her smile is sweet and triumphant and a little bit drunk. Spock stares at her like she's the most fascinating thing in the known universe.

Sometime after the problem children start to doze off, Bones sighs and rolls his head onto Jim's shoulder, too drunk or too tired to care that he's in a tin-can death trap with a bunch of infants in the cold, merciless vacuum of space and therefore obligated to get his grump on. Instead he uses the fabric of Jim's jacket to absently scratch the side of his nose. He reeks and his hair is gross, but Jim doesn't push him off, just slips his arm around Bones' vaguely sticky shoulders and breathes.

 _The best of all possible worlds_ , Jim thinks.

oOo

Time: 0515

Janice Rand is waiting for them in the docking bay wearing her Long-Suffering Yeoman Expression Number Three: A Beat Down Is Seriously Fucking Nigh, James T. Kirk.

Jim may or may not have super glued the door to her quarters shut in order to sneak off ship and retrieve his bridge crew from jail.

“Yeoman Rand! What a pleasant surprise. Did you crawl through the ventilation ducts or did you just glare at the door until it gave up?”

She doesn't even roll her eyes at him. As usual she is completely unmoved and totally cool in the face of Jim's smoldering cheer, from the shiny tips of her regulation boots to the tippy-top of her of no-nonsense hair bun. She tasered him once, when a transporter malfunction gave him a serious case of Rapist and Jim loves her kind of a lot.

There's an eruption of cursing to Jim's right that signifies Christine Chapel has taken charge and is ushering Jim's special, little snowflakes towards Sick-Bay with a judicious application of hypos and medical malpractice, if Bones' pained bitching is anything to go by. Sulu tries to make a run for it, bounding over cargo like a blue smeared half-man, half-deer, all-drunk, freak of athleticism.

Rand catches him by the collar and punts him back towards Chapel without looking up from her PADD.

Once Jim's sure medical has the bridge crew in hand and all attempts at escape have been neatly thwarted, he turns his attention back to Rand. “So, what's the message?”

“No new messages, Captain.” She eyes him in that special way she has that signals she finds Jim in fundamental error, and pulls a hair comb out of seemingly nowhere. Jim doesn't even try to duck it, just holds still and lets her get the whole primate maintenance behavior thing out of her system.

“Really? No messages at all?” It's probably not smart to question her freakishly efficient secretarial skills when she's got a sharp object so close to his eyeballs, but what's life without a little risk?

“No Starfleet memo? Hate mail? Credit-card application? Another requisition for a pony from Engineering?” Jim pauses, considering. “A holo of someone's genitals?” That one earns him a delicate snort and Jim wiggles his eyebrows solicitously.

Rand sighs and the comb vanishes to wherever it is she hides stuff like that. She pointedly checks her PADD again, oozing long-suffering patience under Jim's expectant gaze.

“No. Nothing.”

“That's so weird. I really feel like there should have been a message.”

She looks at him askance as they make their way out of the hanger. “Are you high, sir?”

“What? No. That happened one time,” one _awesome_ time and it's really a damn shame he'll never set foot on Argo again, “can't you let it go?”

oOo

When Jim gets to his quarters he checks the comm, but all that's waiting for him there are Pike's last maneuver for the game of Battle Ship they've been playing for over a month and a digital copy of the bail receipt.

He stares at the screen for a long time, strangely distracted by a vague sense of expectancy.

oOo

There's a bulletin board in the mess, a community catalog of shame, glory and assorted shenanigans. Before hitting the bridge for his shift Jim takes a detour and dives into the organized chaos that is the Alpha shift breakfast rush. Jim slaps the bail receipt to the board and grins when several crewmen cheer over their coffee.

Jim surveys the mess after a moment, taking in the sights and sounds of his crew. He indulges in a little captain-y sociology, updating his internal flow chart of who's clearly shacking up with who ( Lt. Cordila Jax from Intra-ecosystems and Ensign Tsu in Xeno-Protocol) and which couples are still on the war path (Angus “Cupcake” Mathews, Tim Smith and Fran Kingsly in Security still aren't eating together and Jim makes a mental note to take Cupcake out for a drink soon).

It doesn't sit right with him all of the sudden – so much food everywhere, plates and forks and wet snapping mouths. The scrape of replicated silverware and messy smack of idle conversation.

Jim doesn't realize he's made it to the turbolift until he's throwing up in it.

He presses his forehead to the cool metal, throat burning, head pounding in time to the painful thud of his heart.

“Shit.”

oOo

Time: 1215

Bones likes to burst in on the bridge like a summer thunderstorm, all noise and rumbling menace, shaking up Jim's sunny day with his grumpy thunder.

“Are you seriously taking those lunatics planet side?”

Jim swivels in the chair and levels Bones with his most professional expression. “If you are referring to the fine people that comprise the Stellar Cartography Department,” Bones rolls his eyes, “Then yes, I am taking those lunatics planet side. They deserve it. They work hard to make sure we don't warp into a sun or something.”

Bones' mouth does that thing it does right before he relays some grim prediction of bodily harm. He does not disappoint.

“You're going to get maimed, Jim. You've got no goddamn self-control when you go out on these little 'department dates' of yours.”

Jim snickers, because he can hear the quotations in that sentence and Bones is the best show in town when he gets his doom on, all wild eyebrows and emphatic hand gestures.

“They're going to talk you into something stupid and you're going to get arrested.”

Bones shuts up abruptly, mind catching up to his mouth.

“Speaking from _personal_ experience, doctor?”

There's a moment of silence on the bridge and Jim just smiles, and smiles and smiles.

Finally. “Why do you have to bring up old shit?”

“It makes me feel tingly in my man bits. ”

“Unbelievable.”

oOo

The thing is, yeah – Jim is absolutely inviting grief and disaster to befall him in court-marshall shaped rations of shit by personally dallying with his crew. But the fact remains that he is physically incapable of living with eight hundred strangers for five years without learning what makes them tick. He tried, for about a week, when the newness of his captaincy was enough to blot out just about everything in his head that wasn't directly related to how not to fuck this up.

The crew roster was an uncharted territory of unknowns and he was itching, from day one, to dive into it, and see who those people were.

The thing is, Jim has always loved to live in a crowd. 

Department Dates have been his way of getting to know the ship, one group at a time.

Xeno-Anthropology was first; they had soberly demanded cake. (Or death. They all laughed uproariously at that and Jim didn't get the joke, but whatever).

Jim doesn't remember a whole lot from his night out with the medical staff. Christine Chapel fellating a beer bottle is one of his less blurry and greatly cherished memories. He recalls having to corral one of the med techs into helping him fish M'Benga out of an orgy in the public water fountain of the city they were consequently banned from for life, (which was seventy percent awesome and thirty percent horrifying depending on who he tells that story to and how drunk he is at the time.)

Security made him take them to the ballet. (Jim refuses to discuss it.)

oOo

 

Time: 2245

Jim's watching the entire Stellar Cartography department drink, dance and dry-hump their way into Enterprise infamy.

They're a freakishly twitchy group of people on the best of days, all rapid talk and squirming energy. Mapping the ship's exact location in the galaxy, and everything in it, is a high stress job, what with having to do it every fifteen seconds. It makes for a very unnerving group of people with scary focus and what Jim suspects are terrifying hobbies. Jim's never managed to hold more than a two- minute conversation with any of them (they don't blink enough and it kind of makes him nauseous) and he's almost completely certain they scare the shit out of Bones. But they hold their liquor like the intersteller champs they are and get kicked out of three casinos before they throw themselves, en masse, at the loudest dance club on the strip.

Jim watches the carnage unfold from the relative safety of the bar, throwing back the occasional shot of whiskey. Ensigns Bax'ali and Dinah aren't exactly having sex on the dance floor, but it's a near thing considering where two of Bax'ali's four hands are. The Lieutenant Commander who heads Stellar Cartography begins gyrating in a way that signifies imminent nudity. There are cheers all around. Jim is impressed, and preemptively pissed about having to post bail again when it hits him. The smell of rotting vegetation. His mouth goes dry, and his vision wobbles. The shot glass slips from his fingers and hits the floor with a crack that sounds like the clean snap of bone.

His chest tightens, lungs screaming for air he can't seem to make himself take in. The lights of the club fracture, the scene in front of him tearing like wet paper and his eyes burn with the memory of yellow dirt and saffron skies, bodies spoiling under the hot press of the Tarsus sun.

His hands are shaking, and his face is wet with sweat and tears and he's so damn terrified he can't make himself care about it, not when the awful techno of the club gives way to the harsher pop of bombs in the distance, never fucking close enough to the walls of the compound to be helpful.

Gary crying because they did something to his eyes and it burns, Jimmy.

Lenore screaming as the guards drag her down the corridor, her pleas warping into animal noises as Thomas throws himself against the bars -

And it's not real, it's not real, but he can't -

Jim shoulders his way blindly through the crowd, knocking into people and half tripping over himself, the rational part of his mind noting that Captain Kirk is having a panic attack. He can hear himself, the high whine of his strangled breathing over the roar of his heart -

Carol and Kevin huddled against the wall, and she keeps saying hush baby, hush now -

By the time he staggers into the alley every inhale is a flex of razor blades in his chest. There's noise in his head and blood in his mouth and he needs to stop.

Just stop.

Jim plants his hands on the sticky dampness of the wall, finger nails scraping the gritty surface for purchase.

He vomits whiskey in the greasy shadow of the alley, the sounds of his pained retching echoing loud off the walls. When his stomach is empty he stumbles away from the stink and the mess, legs giving out half way to the other side of the alley.

Jim doesn't know how long he's there, on his knees, but when he feels the important pieces of himself slide back into place he almost laughs. Because of fucking course Bones is there, crouched in front of him, the tips of his fingers tracing soothing circles at the nape of Jim's clammy neck.

Of fucking course he is.

Jim wipes his face with a trembling hand, wrung out and strangely hollow. Bones cards his fingers through Jim's sweaty hair, and he lets himself go for it, tipping forward to rest his forehead against Bones' chest. The hands don't stop, they just change trajectory, drifting down his shoulders and back up again, tracing warm, Bones-specific messages into Jim's skin.

“What's your name?”

“James Tiberius Kirk.”

“Where are you?”

“Risa.”

“What's the stardate?”

“2260.”

“Who am I?”

“Leonard McCoy.”

There's a pause.

“Who am I?”

“Bones.”

Gary Mitchell, Kevin Riley, Thomas Leighton, Carol Marcus, Lenore Karidian, and Jim – a fucked up incestuous knot of a family, tied up by love and fear and the memories of hunger and he has no idea why he's thinking of them _now_.

“Jim.”

“I'm okay. Really. Let it go.”

oOo

Bones doesn’t let it go.

 


	2. Crying Won't Help You, Praying Won't Do You No Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Kid, you got somethin' you want to tell me?" His tone is light, gentle, leaving the question open for any kind of answer Jim might want to give.

Part Two: Crying Won't Help You, Praying Won't Do You No Good

 

oOo

_  
Stardate: 2245_

_The heat._

_Always the dry torrid heat. Spilling in through the electrified windows, curling hot and tight around the flesh like a large, unwelcome hand. Lenore cries frustrated miserable tears, her blond hair knotted in sticky ropes down her sweaty back. Jim reaches for her. The touch of skin on skin is unbearable but the lack of contact is worse, so he breathes razors and fights back the prickly itch of discomfort to hold her hands. The others move too, huddling together in an uncomfortable knot of damp bodies and salty skin, until Lenore cries herself into an exhausted sleep._

_Always the heat. The Tarsus sun bearing down and seeping in, carrying with it the stench of the dead._

oOo

  
Stardate: 2260

Fuck what you heard, Captain Kirk is not hiding in Rec Room C.

So what if he has his favorite security team strategically located throughout the deck and standing sentry at the entrance? “Constant vigilance,” he murmurs to himself, completely unlike a crazy person, “is not a crime.”

He's bunkered down behind a fortified defense consisting mostly of padds loaded with department reports, requisition forms, and Starfleet gossip masquerading as memos. He also has one of the vid screens set to display the ship's diagnostics. Thusly armored with the appearance of doing Very Important Things, Jim sneaks a look at the video feed from Med Bay.

If experience has taught him anything, it's that Bones will not be deterred by bureaucracy alone, which is why Jim took steps to keep him occupied. At 0900 that morning five crewmen reported to Medical inexplicably secreting a gooey substance with the exact taste, smell and consistency of pineapple lube.

The scene unfolding before him is a gruesome one. Nurses slipping and sliding across the bay floor, bumping into one another like drunk bees as Bones yells at Lt. Quinn and Myers, who seem to have initiated an impromptu game of Patty Cake (Jim can see why, the goo flies _spectacularly_ with every clap). Ensign Suun is down for the count, sprawled across one of the bio-beds in what Jim instantly recognizes as a hypo-spray induced time out. Chapel and M'Benga are attempting to uncouple Ensign Goro and Chesterfield, who are happily molesting each other in an oozy tangle of hands and tentacles. Nurse Mapel tries to gingerly navigate her way towards the supply room when Chapel abruptly looses her grip on one of Goro's wiggling limbs and from there it's like watching dominoes cascade into a sticky cacophony of vaguely pornographic slapstick.

Satisfied, Jim clicks off the feed and scans the area. Officer Brenna is on point at the entrance, coolly observing the hall with the battle-ready gaze of some kind of Norse goddess. She defended his virtue once, in nothing but an armored breastplate, a leather loincloth and a broad sword the size of a small child. 

A gaggle of off-duty engineers have set up camp at the other end of the rec room. They appear to be building what looks like a trebuchet out of an assortment of commandeered furniture and choice bits of Ensign Bullock's uniform (they managed to relieve him of the lining of his underwear without breaking the No Nudity Before 2200 Hours Rule and just for that Jim is seriously considering giving them a puppy, or something). He approves, on principle alone, of makeshift siege weapons, though he has some reservations about just what or whom they'll be using it on.

“ _Sir, the containment zone has been compromised_.”

Cupcake's voice is small and tinny over the comm unit.

“Did you get a visual?”

“ _No sir. He tripped one of the sensors in air duct B14_.”

Jim cranes his neck back to look up at the ceiling, which, sure enough, also happens to be the underside of air duct B14. A moment later the grate clatters to the floor and expels a suspiciously pilot-shaped figure.

Hikaru Sulu should have been a pirate, swashbuckling his way across the high black sea of space, kidnapping innocent young navigators and striking dramatic poses as stuff blows up behind him. Instead he pilots Jim's ship and likes to drop down out of ventilation shafts with all the grace of a grand piano shoved out of a third-story window.

Sulu hits the floor with a pained grunt, flails briefly, and then throws himself into the chair across from Jim, casually sprawling in a carefully calculated posture that screams, 'I meant to do that, no seriously.'

“Rand did that once. She landed *right* in the chair.”

Sulu rolls his eyes. “That's because Rand's a ninja.”

“ _And_ she brought me a sandwich.”

“It was poisoned.”

“That was an accident.” He had a very minor allergic reaction to the strawberry jam and spent a memorable evening flirting with the inanimate objects in Med Bay while Rand sat at his bedside and did that thing she does when she isn't snickering because that was totally an accident and she would never try to kill him with fruit preservatives. (She'd use her hands.)

“Sir,” Sulu begins and Jim immediately knows nothing good will come of this. “I feel that we need to discuss the terms of our relationship. I'm not satisfied with its current status.”

“Wow,” Jim replies, feeling vaguely betrayed by this sudden and unprovoked act of Couple's Therapy. “I'm already uncomfortable with this conversation.” And confused, because he wasn't aware of having a relationship with Sulu that could be said to have anything even _slightly_ resembling a status, much less a dissatisfied one.

“As your wing-man, I feel the need to point out that you are wallowing, nay -”

“'Nay',” Jim mouths back incredulously.

“ - _marinating_ , in a degree of pining that I am not comfortable with.”

Jim feels his brows furrow, aware that it's not a very good look on him but powerless to stop it. He leans across the table, data padds brushing dangerously with his chin as Sulu inclines forward in turn, a look of total and sincere expectancy on his face.

“Sulu.”

“Sir.”

“What are you even talking about?” Jim doesn't know why he's whispering but it seems like the thing to do.

Sulu gives him the hairy eyeball. “You know what I'm talking about.”

“I really don't.”

Sulu draws back abruptly, glares at him like Jim's an asteroid that had the bad taste to veer into his flight path and must now be dealt with in a torpedo-intensive fashion. Jim watches in rapt fascination as he clears his throat and straightens, as though steeling himself for a difficult act of derring-do (Jim's seen it before, usually when they're about to die painfully).

From the nose up, Sulu's face engages in stuttered theatrics, eyebrows fighting their natural horizontal alignment in an attempt to hoist one up higher than the other. His left eye goes squinty, the right widening in a twitching, comical “O”. As far as Bones impressions go, it's terrible. But to be fair, they're *all* terrible failures compared Hortense Burner down in Documents & Records and that's because her eyebrows are just, like, _ridiculously_ pliable.

Next to her Sulu just looks like a man unexpectedly experiencing anal related discomfort.

“You look like there's something up your ass and you're not quite sure you like it.”

“Aw, you do remember that one time in Lecture Room B.”

The sudden flush of heat across his face is _not_ a blush. Jim's ability to register embarrassment was ruthlessly suppressed through a rigorous campaign of will power and staunch denial, therefore he is experiencing the mythical male oriented hot flash, which is totally not the same thing and utterly unrelated to the topic at hand. (Even if he could blush, it's not like he has anything to be embarrassed about anyway, Sulu is _hot_ and Jim can't be held responsible for things he did with his future bridge pilot while under the effects of an Astrophysics Lecture induced hard-on.)

Jim points an accusatory finger at him. “You promised never to mention that again.”

Sulu waves a dismissive hand, unconcerned with matters of honor between men. “I promise a lot of things when I'm sober.”

“I hate you a lot.”

“Your face is turning red.” Sulu offers, totally undeterred. “Like really red.”

“It's the hate, it's causing a physiological response.”

Sulu waggles his eyebrows in a manner that can only be described as dastardly. “Fever of the blood, Captain?”

“It's a _hate_ rash,” Jim hisses.

“They have creams for that now.” Sulu suddenly snaps his fingers with the look of one who should have a cartoon light bulb over his head. “That's it! Listen. Here's what you do, just go down there and tell McCoy you have a medical emergency.” Dramatic pause. “In your pants.” Cue inappropriate accompanying hand gesture.

“Oh, that's funny, what you did there,” Jim says, narrowing his eyes at Sulu's cocky fly-boy smile. Normally this would be when he makes joke number one-hundred-and-counting about Sulu and parking breaks but really, this sort of hypocrisy calls for corporal punishment.

“Hold that thought for just a second.” Jim taps the comm unit with flourish, summoning his Serious Captain voice with gusto. “Cupcake, throw Mr. Sulu in the brig.”

There is a moment of profound silence in the rec room, and then the engineers start singing a dirge, loudly and with childish enthusiasm.

Sulu's game-face lasts exactly three seconds before it caves spectacularly, his sputtering laugh building up into a full blown fit by the time Cupcake stalks up behind him like the ominous shadow of abused authority. Jim tries to school his own expression into a smooth facade of banal amusement but ends up blowing it when he realizes he's doing his best Pike impersonation.

Cupcake plants two large hands on Sulu and lifts him up out of the chair, casually tossing Sulu over his shoulder. A sudden stab of nauseous memory makes Jim's heart jack-knife. The rag-doll looseness of Kevin's limbs, the way his head rolls when the guard picks him up, and then Sulu laughs, slapping Cupcake on the ass as he's carried out of the rec room.

Jim closes his eyes, breathes through his nose and does the Klein–Gordon equation for a free particle in his head until he feels like his heart isn't about to explode.

When he opens them again, he's treated to the unexpected and all- knowing stare of Lt. Uhura, breacher of secured perimeters, scourge of all Not-Hiding-In-Rec-Room-C captains everywhere. She cut her hair, trademark ponytail replaced with a stylish bob that makes the graceful curve of her neck look ridiculously edible. Jim taps the comm unit.

“ _Sir._ ”

“My perimeter has been compromised,” he observes in a totally futile attempt to reassert control over the situation.

“ _Yes, sir.”_ Cupcake agrees. _“She brought us cookies._ ”

Jim frowns at the empty space where officer Brenna should be. Uhura brushes a spec of nonexistent dust off of her uniform. “What kind?”

“ _Snicker doodle, sir._ ”

“Damn. Those are delicious.”

Abandoned in the field by those he trusted most, Jim sighs and turns the full force of his attention on Uhura, who exudes at least eight kinds of terminal disinterest in him, cleverly disguising what is no doubt a staggering amount of affection for his person. 

“Did you throw Sulu in the brig again?” She asks in Klingon, apropos of absolutely nothing, instantly improving Jim's day by ten fold.

“He is a base defiler and must be taught a lesson,” Jim answers promptly, enjoying the way the Klingon word for “defiler” rolls off his tongue like something wiggly and alive. “This is the only way he'll learn.”

Uhura raises a shapely eyebrow. “With porn and cookies?”

It's true. What should be known only as Secured Holding Cell 3 is openly referred to by the crew as “Time Out”. It's festooned with Christmas lights, an anonymously donated teddy bear and is stocked with a data padd full of porn as well as an assortment of cookies. (When Pike found out on his last ship inspection, he slapped Jim on the back of the head and loudly declared that he Did Not Want To Know.)

“One does not question what Captain Kirk does, one merely accepts it as awesome.”

Uhura laughs, her smile redolent with exasperated fondness, the apples of her cheeks accentuated by the new cut of her hair. It's a well known and celebrated fact in Jim Kirk's personal world view that Uhura's smiles are _stellar_ , and should be appreciated – so he leans back in his chair and does so, enjoying the warm, buoyant feeling he gets in the bottom of his stomach whenever he manages to make her smile.

She sobers after a moment, smoothly slipping back into Standard. “You gave Leonard a heart attack last night.” Softly, “Are you alright?”

Jim winces openly, because it's Uhura and most of his efforts at muffling his body language around her fail miserably, so mostly he tries not to. “I'm fine and also, how did you know about that?”

She shrugs. “I know everything.”

They lapse into a comfortable silence while the engineers argue about trajectory. Uhura lifts a self-conscious hand to her hair, black stands whispering between her fingers as she worries the shorn ends.

“Quit fussing with it,” he murmurs without looking up. “You're beautiful.”

A balled up piece of paper bounces off the top of his head and hits the table. He and Uhura blink stupidly at it. There's an explosion of muffled laughter from the other side of the room – the fully functioning trebuchet side, awesome – and Jim feels himself grinning as he smoothes open the paper to read the block-lettered message written on the inside.

'ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US'

“This is mine,” Jim says, carefully folding the scrap of paper and tucking it into his pocket, “you can't have it.” Uhura just rolls her eyes and smiles her Cheshire smile.

*

The _Enterprise_ is crewed by orphans, exiles and widows. By men and women damaged and defined in some way by every possible configuration of loss. The burden of their dead and the certainty that they won't live to see 40 gives them their own source of gravity, one that pulls them towards each other in the dark, like lonely satellites huddling in orbit around a common rock.

They touch too much and laugh too loud, living without permission or apology in each other's back pockets, the professional boundaries and traditional courtesies of rank registering on a level only dogs and Admirals can hear – and that's the weight the _Narada_ left them with. Survivor's guilt, PTSD and a fierce loyalty to one another. The core crew, the survivors of the original 600 that departed with Pike and returned with Jim, are exclusionary, deferring first to a camaraderie that marks them as veterans of a war they don't yet have a name for.

They were young together, his crew, in that brief period before they all bled for Vulcan and that will always be the standard by which they measure trust. That will always be the defining landmark of the _Enterprise's_ psychological geography. It's put Jim on the receiving end of more than one lecture. Gifted him with frowns and admonishments from the brass. They say he's too close to his crew, and that his crew is too convivial. Even Pike believes it, the handsome lines of his face never quite managing complete inscrutability in the wake of their many and varied trespasses. But he at least, understands _why_.

Christine Chapel watched Dr. Puri, her mentor of eight years, and first real father figure, get crushed to death between the containment doors of deck six. Lt. Quin's best friend bled out in his arms, shrapnel splintered in the center of his chest like a steel flower. Fran Kingsly's baby sister died of rapid decompression, sucked out into the vacuum of space among the scattered detritus of the mangled fleet just minutes after passing her in Engineering. McKenna's fiancée was trapped in a closed off section of the cargo bay, dying of smoke inhalation while she was three decks above him, prepping the transporter pad. Janice Rand's mother served on the Farragut.

Jim's crew has chewed up and spit out twelve on-ship counselors in two years.

They don't get the luxury of being young. They don't have the option of growing into their duties at a pace slower than 'do or die'. So they revel in each other's embarrassing foibles, delight in rudely interfering in one another's attempts at romantic intrigue, building trebuchets and pillow forts in their spare time, thinking nothing of taking Orion Lubricant pills just because their Captain asked them to with a wink and the right kind of smile.

*

Jim stares mournfully down at his cards. They're resolute in their determination to be absolute crap. He casts a forlorn look at the mountain of hot water credits sitting in the middle of the poker table.

“I hope you drown,” he announces to the table at large, ever magnanimous in defeat. “Fold.”

Christine cranes her neck to get a look at his unmitigated failure and actually whistles, low and impressed. “Wow, sir. Would you like some ice?”

“Ice?” he parrots stupidly, kind of distracted because he can sort of see down her shirt with her leaning over like that and it's amazing.

“She means for your ass, Jim.” Bones' mouth curves in a sideways smile that makes his lips look imminently lickable. “You seem to be getting it kicked pretty hard.”

Jim gives her the solicitous horn-dog grin that never failed to get him into older women's beds and all the best trouble back in Riverside. “Oh, kinky. Just be gentle with me.”

Bones snorts and Christine smiles, sly and sweet. “But where would the fun be in that?”

Game night evolved as a defensive tactic against the soul crushing boredom that prevailed whenever the _Enterprise_ wasn't engaged in terrifying life-or-death shenanigans. It was trial and error (and the occasional fire) trying to find a game they could all play. Bridge, Pinochle, Andorian Checkers, Emphatically Not Naked Twister, Goddamn It Jim – all terrible failures. Pictonary had been promising until Uhura and Spock had to destroy crew morale by being completely unbeatable.

They settled on poker after the great Monopoly Debacle, which had involved gentle, recreational violence between friends, and someone nearly choking to death on one of the game pieces. Recollections are hazy, but everyone is in agreement that somewhere around hour three and too many Cardassian Sunrises, Christine had shoved all the money down her shirt and proclaimed herself Emperor. Security had intervened after that, Jim's not sure why exactly. He was pretty drunk by then and Cupcake still refuses to talk about it.

Every second Tuesday of the month (or as close as they can get), Jim, Bones, Sulu, Chekov, Scotty, and Christine meet in Conference Room Three to get plastered and wager their monthly allotments of hot water credits on a couple rounds of poker. Spock never plays, but occasionally attends as a one Vulcan peanut gallery, dryly pointing out their various failings as card players for – as far as Jim can tell – no other purpose than to drive Bones ever closer towards an aneurysm, which seems to be Spock's third most preferred method of passing an afternoon.

Bones sits next to Jim at the poker table, radiating warmth and smelling faintly of pineapple lube. He's been throwing Jim the occasional suspicious glare all night, frowny little gestures of passive-aggressive annoyance flavored with a side of menacing worry. It would be a buzz kill if it wasn't so obviously an attempt to mask how much he wants to swaddle Jim in bubble wrap and lock him in a closet until he can Jim-Proof the universe. Bones hasn't cornered Jim with his concerned vitriol since 1200, when he relentlessly harassed Jim's text feed for a solid hour with increasingly hostile demands that he go eat something. (And Jim _tried_ to, squaring off with a PB &J sandwich for five queasy minutes before donating it to a table of ravenous looking yeomen).

Sulu's stewing in grumpy indecision, clad only in a pair of electric blue non-regulation boxers and a hideous monstrosity of a knit cap Chekov made for him. His form of non-violent protest at being reprimanded to Time Out had manifested in the form of partial nudity and he had clearly not felt the need to re-don the appropriate drapery when Jim let him out.

Bones' knee bounces impatiently, his face scrunched up adorably in a scowl that means he's committing acts of great violence in his head while Sulu contemplates his cards with a look of delusional determination.

“For fuck's sake, _fold_ already.”

Christine watches matters unfold with the lazy interest of the intoxicated, head pillowed casually on Scotty's shoulder, who has taken refuge from the stand off with his padd. Jim's angle is kind of jacked, so he's not sure if Scotty's playing Minesweeper or reading porn.

“While we're young, flyboy,” Bones snaps and Sulu finally bows to circumstance and implicit homicide, throwing his cards down on the table and immediately consoling himself with a shot of what they've all been calling schnapps but is, in all likelihood, probably rotgut.

Bones swings his attention to Chekov, the only player who has yet to fold.

“Call,” Chekov chirps cheerfully, like he has dozens of times before, consigning himself to defeat with a good natured grace that seems almost medicated in origin.

Bones fans out his Straight Flush on the table with a satisfied little grin that makes Jim's belly do familiar somersaults. He always looks unbelievably young when he's pleased with himself and as far as Jim's concerned that's worth a month of sonic showers.

Chekov clears his throat as Bones reaches for the credits.

He primly sets down a Royal Flush.

Scotty drops his porn.

Bones stares at the Royal Flush with the unblinking gaze of a man rendered dumb by shock, mouth working soundlessly before he emits something squeaky and high pitched.

Chekov briskly pulls the mountain of hot water credits towards himself. “Poker-face,” he tells Bones in a complete deadpan, “was invented in Russia.”

Bones' mouth clicks shut. His right eyebrow twitches. Wordlessly, and without ceremony, he dumps an entire bowl of replicated salsa over the top of Chekov's head.

Christine erupts into a bubbling cascade of laughter, and Scotty hoots loudly while Sulu just smiles, lazy and open in that way that means he's amazed and amused. Chekov curses merrily, and wipes chunks of tomato away from his laughing eyes -

\- Thomas with his hand pressed against his eye, pale fingers frail and twig-like under the sick light of the pink moon. “Jimmy, I know how to make it go away.”

Jim gently slides his arm out from under Kevin – he's dreaming of blue skies, pretty and wide open like they haven't seen in forever - and frowns at Thomas, the knot in the bottom of his stomach tightening uneasily. He glances nervously at Gary, Carol and Lenore, sleeping in a pile of sprawled, skinny limbs.

Jim swallows. “Make what go away?”

“The monsters,” Thomas whispers, and sinks the nail-bitten tips of his fingers into his wide, unseeing eye, his face twisted and red as everyone wakes up screaming.

“Captain?”

“Jim!”

Pain blossoms inside his skull and Jim chokes on the scream, body seizing around the silence, palm pressed helplessly against his eye. “Fuck,” he croaks out, shrugging away from Bones' prodding hands.

“Christine, grab my med kit.”

“No, Bones – seriously.” Dropping his hand from his eye feels like exposing the raw meat of a vulnerable wound, and Kirk itches all over with the need to shelter it. “Just, I got some tomato in my eye.” He holds up a placating hand, trying to fortify an imaginary wall in the space between them.

“Can you see out of it?”

“Yeah,” Jim lies.

“I'm sorry Captain.” Chekov's anxious face is drawn in worry and it kind of makes Jim want to get him a comfy blanket and a cookie.

“It's fine,” he says, reaching out to flick a rebel chunk of jalapeño off Chekov's cheek. It hits the center of Sulu's bare chest and falls to the card-strewn table. Sulu pops it in his mouth. There is silence as Scotty peers speculatively at the sauce across Chekov's shoulders. He plucks a corn chip out of one of the snack bowls and shovels a decent portion of salsa off Chekov before taking a bite.

“S'good salsa,” he says brightly.

Christine tugs on Chekov's arm and he leans towards her obligingly, watching her take a profoundly unladylike slurp of the dollop of sauce at the inside of his elbow. She wrinkles her nose, “Needs more Tabasco.”

“That,” Bones declares, “is disgusting.”

*

He doesn't sleep that night.

His eye pounds phantom pain. His stomach heaves bile and bitter memories.

*

At the end of Jim's first shift on the bridge, Bones announces himself with surprise hypo to the neck just as the turbolift doors close.

“Fuck, Bones!”

“Good morning, Sunshine.” He's in full blown grump-mode, arms crossed, eye-brows scrunched up in a dark line as he glares, oozing unrepentant bitchery as Jim dances from toe to toe, hand pressed to his abused jugular.

Bones looks him up and down. “Don't _you_ look fresh as a daisy.”

If daisies looked like scruffy, sleep deprived star ship captains on the edge of a psychotic break down, then yes.

“Fuck off,” Jim says, flipping him the bird for good measure.

“And in such a good mood,” Bones drawls. “Did you eat breakfast?”

Jim grits his teeth. “Yeah.”

“Liar.”

Jim opens his mouth, keen on opening a case of whole-sale snark but the words dry up on his tongue when Bones suddenly invades his personal space. Bones cups his face with both hands, the broad warmth of his palms fitting neatly against the line of Jim's jaw. It twists him up and shuts him up and Jim just stands there, feeling weirdly exposed and helplessly trapped. Bones eyes go soft and grave in that way they sometimes do when he's aching to fix something.

“Kid, you got somethin' you want to tell me?” His tone is light, gentle, leaving the question open for any kind of answer Jim might want to give.

*

Jim Kirk's List of True Things Numbers 4 Through 7:

4\. He knows Bones buys him birthday cards every year and keeps them in a locked box under his bed.  
5\. It's why Jim loves him  
6\. He ate that last piece of red velvet cake and he regrets nothing.  
7\. He lies to Bones all the time and almost never feels bad about it.

*

Jim brushes the pads of his fingers across Bones' knuckles and grins.

“There's a trebuchet in Rec Room C.”

Bones searches his face for a moment before dropping his hands and huffing an unimpressed grunt. “Of course there is.”

The doors swoosh open to the crowded mess hall, noise and light spilling into the turbolift. Bones pauses half way out, one foot across the sill. He turns, reaches and presses something into Jim's hand before stomping out into the chaos of the lunch rush.

Jim stands alone for a long time, clutching the hot water credit, the sweaty palm of his hand chasing the ghost of Bones' warmth.


	3. Part Three - Bedlam

 

   
**Stardate: 2245  
Riverside, Iowa**

“Jimmy! You get your butt down here!”

George Samuel Kirk stares up at the ceiling and waits for the tell-tale groan of floorboards and muffled crash that signals the coming of one James Kirk, resident genius and scourge of Riverside.

There's a loud, resounding bang, and the sound of scrambling, scheming ten-year-old. Sam frowns at the crack in the ceiling, attempting to divine the goings-on above him by the wooden creaks and heavy slap of combat boots.

Jim's like an unsteady tornado, not exactly bent on wholesale destruction, but providing it anyway. After about a minute he hurls himself down the stairs, all wildly flapping limbs and messy blond hair. He up-ends a chair on his way to the kitchen and comes to an abrupt halt in front of Sam.

“Yeah, hi – good morning.”

Sam checks the chrono above the sink.

It's four in the afternoon.

School has only been out for two weeks and Jim has already abandoned what little grip on the concept of time and its conventions Sam managed to instill in him. Sam looks back at Jim. His entire face is black with the exception of the skin around his eyes.

He knows this is a ridiculous question before he asks it.

“What happened to your face?”

Jim takes a giant breath and Sam hastily interjects, “In five words or less.”

Jim momentarily deflates. Shrugs. “I fixed the cooling unit.”

That explains the ball-shriveling chill currently embalming the house.

“Okay, but seriously, no. What are you even wearing?”

Jim blinks and peers down at himself, his soot-scorched goggles digging into his chin.

He's wearing a battered pair of gray pants that are too big and too long, the legs bunching around his clunky, permanently untied army-boots. He appropriated one of Winona's old work shirts and duct-taped over the rips with lopsided Xs. He's got on an abused canvas jacket over that, the frayed sleeves pushed up around his red elbows. All in all, it's a standard deviation of Jim's usual uniform, tied together with a liberal splatter of something green.

Jim tips his head and fingers the hem of his shirt speculatively. Sam knows a Taste Test Is Imminent look when he sees one, so he snatches a wet washcloth from the sink and darts forward, launching a surprise attack on Jim's face.

Jimmy's rodent fast and octopus wriggly, but Sam just throws his weight against him and lets gravity do most of the work, wrestling Jim down to the kitchen floor.

“Did you eat yet?” Sam asks, dodging a flapping hand.

Jim attempts to worm his head away from the washcloth and grunts a reluctant, “Yeah.”

Translation: No.

This is one of his more inexplicable quirks, this casual contempt for food. Whenever anyone asks about it Jim just goes tight lipped and squinty eyed. For all any of them know Jimmy was mortally offended by a grape fruit when he was four and he's been holding a grudge ever since. Sam doesn't know. Jim is not a sane person. Jim's hatred for pancakes is based entirely on the fact that they aren't _waffles_.

“Mrs. Heightmayer was legally declared dead this morning,” Sam says, just tossing it out there experimentally. Jim knocks Sam's ribs with one bony knee and flails ridiculously, squirming in a futile attempt at escape. 

“Guess how I know that? She told me.” Loudly and at length. And with several totally uncalled for slaps to the back of his head, but dignity demands a certain amount of discretion, so Sam presses on. “She was pretty goddamn _spry_ for what the Riverside Gazette tells me is a corpse.”

Jim smiles his sneaky smile but says nothing.

Jim and head librarian, Bernice Heightmayer, have been locked in an epic battle of wills for the last year and a half. Their rivalry was sanctified when she caught him hacking the digital catalog (Jim having apparently decided to just bypass her entirely and take the library's shoddy fucking tag system - Jim's description - into his own hands). Jim's aggravated assault on her catalog got him banned from the library for life, a chastisement he has failed to meet with grace and humility.

Sam takes one last, determined swipe at Jim's cheek with the washcloth and then hauls him up by the lapels of his jacket. Sam plants both hands on Jim's skinny shoulders and summons his most sober expression.

“Jimmy, you can be honest. Is it the zombie apocalypse and nobody told me?”

Jim nods gravely. “Yes. The hardest part has been pretending that I'm not excited about it.”

"Uh huh."

What follows is a brief staring contest, the likes of which Sam has been using as his principle method of propelling Jim towards the end of an argument without the hassle of actually yelling, for years.

Jim's face sours dramatically and he sort of squirms in place before finally biting out, “I didn't do it.”

Sam lets that little bit of bold-faced delusion hang there like the lying lie it is.

“You can't _prove_ I did it,” Jim hedges.

"Well, could you go undo whatever it is I can't prove you did? Before the cops get here? Now would be awesome."

The intervening silence suggests that Jim is deciding whether or not he wants to be stubborn about it, but in the end Jim just turns on his heel and sulks out of the kitchen, mouth pinched and shoulders hunched.

Sam frowns at his retreating back.

“Hey, buddy?”

Jim stops. “What?”

“Thanks for fixing the cooling unit.”

He ducks his head, and shrugs, but Sam catches the small flicker of a grin.

All at once, something that’s been sitting tight and nervous in Sam’s chest loosens. He’s hugely, pathetically grateful for it, for this one thing to not have to worry about anymore. Because while everything else has gone to shit, Jim is at least talking again.

It’s the first he’s spoken to Sam since Tiberius died on them.

*

Jim used to crash into the kitchen every morning at five, clumsy, squinty-eyed and rambling to himself about the first thing that popped into his massive, idiot brain when he woke up. It’s why Sam knows the social hierarchy of honey bees and the first theory of thermonuclear expansion. Pure early morning Jim exposure, like Sam’s head had been designated by a higher power as the appropriate dumping ground for all the useless crap Jim learned on accident.

Those mornings, Tiberius would nod to Sam before cuffing Jim upside the head with fond impatience and a brief, “Let’s get a move on Mr. Kirk”, never _once_ letting on that cancer was eating away at his insides, a sticky black sickness fouling his aged and fragile veins.

*

Tiberius left Sam nothing but his debts and devotions.

*

The left hand door of the Riverside post office is broken and locked shut, the other heavy and resentful, its gummy hinges whining stubbornly when Sam puts his weight against it. The front desk is manned by a perpetually bored looking employee whose vapid attention never seems to waver far from the holovid display mounted on the wall – _despite earlier controversies surrounding the research outpost on Tarsus IV, the Federation Council gave final approval to the Karidian Company’s request to continue settlement efforts on the fourth planet. Karidian spokesperson, E. Molson, responded today, stating that the company was grateful for the opportunity to expand operations in the Tarsus system_ -

Sam follows the grubby wall of polymer lockers, the metal panels stamped with greasy fingerprints and assorted dents, the key swipes blinking muted yellow under the white noise of naked fluorescent lights.

Sam has to run his card twice before the console will read it. The abused circuitry emits an aggrieved click-snap before flashing green and swinging open, revealing a single thick envelope.

*

Sam sits in the stall of the men's room for a long time, just holding it, heart thudding hard against his sternum.

 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

It's heavy.

Sam stares at the neat clean print. Hears the crisp sigh of paper as he tears it open.

_Congratulations Mr. Kirk, you have been accepted into -_

Sam cries like he's dying.

*

He's his mother's son. He wants to be unattached and unanchored, free of anything that isn't his own desire. Jim needs so much, all the time, and it doesn't fucking matter how much Sam gives him today, he's just going to need it all again _tomorrow_.

*

The farm house grows tall in the distance, a boxy hodgepodge of modern weirdness and traditional sprawl, the setting sun casting crazy shadows across the dirt dusty expanse of what passes for a yard in Iowa.

Six generations of Kirks have wearied its edges and scuffed its floors, building it up and out, its battered doors flung open to the rearing of children and the temporary respite of the wayward. A safe harbor for a family of spacefarers and those whose love they collected along the way. In the handful of summers before Jimmy was born, Sam remembers the excited press and noise of people streaming in and out of the house. Crewmen his parents brought home with them, who either had nowhere to go, or for whom the prospect of shore leave seemed a daunting luxury.

In those warm, rosy months Sam had more than just the doting attention of parents making up for lost time; he had a tribe. Engineers and helmsmen ready to make room for him when other arms grew tired.

Sam remembers being carried, his cheek pressed to a warm shoulder as George quietly made his way through the house, whispering the names of his crew to Sammy as he went, like he was passing on something secret and precious. Those names had felt like family then, a logical expansion of what was already there, a natural branching.

Even in the lean, quiet months of fall, when the house emptied out and the fields grew thick and heavy with autumn, people would come. Men and women who had served with Tiberius, their tired and road weary faces arriving at the door at all hours. Sam remembers how easily two places at the table would wordlessly become three. Remembers how normal it was to wake up to unknown faces made familiar only by the threadbare edges of faded Starfleet patches on worn sleeves.

It’s a different house now, its dimensions grown tight and narrow, reduced to a clutch of hungry rooms that soak up Jim’s frustrated noise and throw it back in long, lonely creaks. Terran clocks ticking their way past the silence of the dead.

*

It’s quiet when Sam crosses the sill and steps in into the house, his hands still tingling with the memory of ripping paper. He’s nearly to the stairs when he hears it, a staccato stutter of muffled sobs, and feels his heart sink.

Sam backtracks and steps wearily into the kitchen, empty stomach twisting with guilt. He edges around the table to find Jim hunched in the corner, wet-faced and flushed, fighting to catch his own breath.

“Jimmy?”

Jim doesn’t answer, just hunkers down more, the narrow line of his shoulders trembling as Sam gingerly crouches down beside him.

It happens sometimes, these sudden jags. Jim’s squirrely, magpie mind suddenly overwhelmed by everything and nothing in particular, all his gears coming to an abrupt, panicked halt.

Sam eases an arm around him and reaches up with the other, awkwardly groping for the book that's been sitting in the silverware drawer since Winona's last visit. Sam pushes it into Jim's clammy, fumbling grip. The anxiety bleeds out of him almost as soon as his eyes settle on the page, body loosening under the neatness of _The Wine-Dark Sea_.

Sam watches him read, tired and heartsick.

*

He carries Jim up stairs later, when he’s calm enough for exhaustion.

“I’m sorry.”

Jim’s voice is slurred, muffled by his pillow.

Sam shifts on the edge of the bed, and lays his hand flat against Jim’s back. “Not your fault, buddy.”

“God, you’re _stupid_.” Jim rolls away from him. Jim says nothing for long enough that Sam eventually gets up, and lowers the lights to ten percent.

*

Sam drinks an entire bottle of Wild Turkey and wakes the next morning on the floor of the bathroom, where he vomits whiskey until it hurts to breathe.

*

When he found Tiberius slumped across the comm - the weight of his head on the keyboard writing a single, unbroken line of ‘s’ across the screen - Sam sent one message to Winona.

*

A month later, he sent another.

_Where the fuck are you?_

*

Jim pulls one of his disappearing acts, only it doesn’t quite take because he’s pretty much a ghost during the day, but he loudly grumps into Sam’s bed at night, tucking up against him with his cold toes and quiet little snuffles as Sam stares up at the ceiling and forms a plan.

*

Five days later Sam tracks Jim down – for certain varieties of “track down”.

He crosses the thirty yards between the house and the barn, where George’s car has sat since Jimmy was born. Sam finds him sprawled in the back seat, surrounded by books, bits of circuitry, and half a dozen padds. The data chip Sam left on Jim’s desk is on the floorboard. It’s a risk, but if Winona could do it, if _she_ could escape the claustrophobic rot of Iowa, then he and Jim can, too.

Sam opens the door and squirms his way in behind the passenger seat, shoving debris aside and flopping down beside Jim with a soft _whump_.

Sam remembers riding in this car with the top down, a hot wave of summer sunshine whipping through Winona’s hair, the ends tickling his face as George half turned towards him, eyes crinkled at the edges, the sun-baked earth stretching out beyond him.

Sam nudges the data chip with the tip of his shoe.

“What do you think, buddy?”

For a long time Jim just looks at him.

“Leave home,” he offers softly.

“ _Go_ home,” Sam whispers.

*

 

  
**Stardate: 2246**  
Tarsus IV  
  
They took almost nothing with them when they left Riverside. Just clothes, and books Jim couldn’t bear to leave behind. Everything else is boxed and tucked away under plastic sheets. The house is sealed shut and the past along with it.

Colony expansion tends to draw a certain demographic. Drifters committed to the religion of distance, private contractors with no attachments and couples seeking new context. Sam and Jim slot in neatly among them, where expectations stretch no further than tomorrow and look no further back than yesterday.

*

Tarsus’ forgiving possibilities are built on polite amnesia.

*

Sam’s been on his feet for eighteen hours when he finally staggers into Security Outpost Four, thoroughly sleep deprived and coasting on the last jittery dregs of his caffeine high. The light buzz of conversation in the bull pen immediately dies down to the familiar timbre of expectant glee. Sam’s made this particular walk of shame enough times that he can gauge the level of Jim’s juvenile delinquency by the quality of the snickering alone.

Commander Irmak is hunched in his chair, a sullen lump of authority. Sam comes to a wobbly halt in front of him. Somewhere behind them an officer chokes on stifled laughter, which triggers a brief wave of giggles throughout the room and an answering cacophony of “Shhh,”, “Shut up,” and, “This is gonna be _good_.”

Irmak looks at Sam hard, visibly steels himself and then opens his mouth.

The sound that emerges is distinctly quack-like. The sound that emerges **is** quacking.

Wow. “Wow.”

Irmak makes a sudden flailing hand gesture, and says “Quack quack quack quack HONK!”

  
Duck chatter shouldn’t have much in the way of nuance, but Irmak finds a way to convey his displeasure anyway, jabbing a finger at Sam and letting loose with a long stream of quacking that clearly means “My desire to commit grievous acts of violence upon your person is _unfathomable_.”

Sam sidles cautiously around Irmak’s desk, out of throttling and/or stabbing range. “Yeah, yes, I’ll just – I’ll get on that.”

A torrent of agitated quackatude follows Sam all the way down the hall to the holding tank.

*

Sam finds Jim and his merry band of reprobates sleeping on the floor of their preferred holding cell, slouched against one another, snoring with varying degrees of drool. Jim’s sprawled across Gary’s lap, with Thomas’ face mashed up against Jim’s belly, legs akimbo. Lenore is plastered against Gary’s right side, and Carol his left. Kevin has both arms around her waist. In a state of heart-warming repose, they look innocent. Serene, even.

Every sleep-deprived molecule in Sam’s body vibrates with sudden intense villainy.

Sam takes a humongous breath. “Good _morning_!”

The effect is instantaneous, and deeply beautiful, youth flying in every direction. A sort of spring-loaded domino effect occurs as Gary darts up into a standing position, an unfortunate choice of locomotion for Carol and Lenore who pull a Wile E. Coyote mid-air flail before crashing into each other. Thomas makes a ridiculous flopping leap backwards and falls on Kevin who’s first instinct is to wrap his arms and legs around Jim like a freaked out spider monkey in free fall. There are cries, and curses - all the appreciate vocalizations.

“Jesus, Sammy!”

“- can’t feel my spleen -”

“No, no, your *other* arm, move your –“

“You’re on my hair!”

“New rule,” Sam announces over the rising tide of adolescent bitchery. “No hacking Universal Translators. In fact, no hacking ever. “ And then, just to be safe: “Of _anything_.”

The inevitable tantrum over Sam’s moratorium is mitigated by the delicate detangling process. Thomas and Gary start picking apart the knot where Carol’s hair caught on Lenore’s giant barrette (made entirely of paper clips). Eventually Jim gives up trying to dislodge Kevin and simply accepts it, wrapping an arm around him.

Carol’s pout is disapproving. “Why do you hate fun, Sam? What did fun ever do to you?”

“You have to admit,” Jim adds, shifting Kevin’s iron-clad grip into something more circulation friendly, “it was funny.”

This is true, but the significance is dampened somewhat by the fact that Sam could be *sleeping* now, instead of standing here, marinating in his own three-day-old funk.

Kevin peers at him from his fortified position against Jim’s shoulder, fingers plucking the hem of Jim’s shirt. “You’re not really mad. Are you, Sammy?”

All eyes turn to Sam. The emphatically non-regulation LED lights stung along the walls blink cheerful periwinkle, catching softy on the mini-starships hanging from the ceiling.

Sam rubs a hand down his face. It’s 0600, and he only has two, _maybe_ three hours before Aurelian comms him, threatening to set fire to the entire Star Fleet Engineer Corps barracks if they don’t stop getting their stunning idiocy all over her unmitigated genius. And three seconds after _that_ before Dr. Hillshire texts him with what Sam already knows will be some variation on “Hey, Aurelian found a blow torch; you might want to get down here.” Sam needs sleep, a shower, and **also** sleep, roughly in that order.

He should send Jim and the lot of them home but Sam knows what’s not waiting for them back at their own quarters.

Sam groans and palms his sandy eyes. “You want breakfast?”

“Food!”

“ _So_ hungry –“

“- squid ink pasta –“

“Oh, *gross* - ”

“That comes from squid butts!”

“– _starving_ –“

“Pancakes!”

*

Jim didn’t have friends back in Riverside. He was too smart to be liked and too reclusive for rivalry, preferring the safety and distraction of his own lonely orbit. Kids his age were either too slow or too scared to keep up with him and Jim’s overtures with the older kids had been met with turned backs and balled fists. When Jim went to school he went with his head firmly down and his guard permanently up.

That changed when they got to Tarsus.

*

Kevin Riley was the first. He appeared at their tiny puke-green kitchenette like an apparition, startling Sam out of his 0500 pre-coffee daze.

“Hi?”

“Hi.” Kevin smiled. He had dark floppy hair and glossy black eyes.

“Is that my holocube?” Sam nodded towards the mess of circuitry in front of Kevin.

They both stared at it, the cube sitting in a nest of its own gutted remains.

“Yes,” Kevin answered. Then added, “I fixed it.”

Before Sam could open his mouth and explain everything that was wrong with that sentence Kevin tapped the cube. Enterobacteria phage X1 flickered ghostly blue above the table, its tail fibers swaying like seaweed. Kevin adjusted the slider on the cube and the perspective shifted, sinking down through the capsid of the viroid to reveal a helix of repeating protein sub-units spreading like flowers in bloom.

Sam stared and worked his jaw for a moment. “I didn’t know it could do that.”

“It can’t,” Jim said, having apparently wandered in while Sam was ogling. “Reformatting that thing is like, eight kinds of illegal.”

In an instant, Kevin went from sitting to hanging off Jim’s shoulders, with none of the bits in-between. Jim jockeyed Kevin around until he was situated piggy-back style.

There was an odd little moment then, a stretch of silence as Enterobacteria phage X1 floated gently in the serenity of its criminal light while Jim shifted his weight and Kevin, too – and then it hit Sam. What a funny sideways gesture it was, that Jim would introduce Sam to a friend this way.

Sam closed his hand around the holocube, looked Kevin in the eye with as much sincerity as he could summon on short notice, and smiled.

“Thank you.”

*

Sam doesn’t know how Jim found Lenore Karidian, or if it was the other way around. Sam nursed a perpetual heart attack over it for two solid weeks. He couldn’t help but envision the millions of ways it could end badly whenever he stumbled home to find Jim, Kevin and the governor’s only daughter on the floor of the living room, covered with dirt, or smelling suspiciously of ozone. Nightmare scenarios flitted across Sam’s mind every time he tripped over another one her books, or found her dresses mixed in with their laundry; Lenore breaking an arm, Lenore going missing, Lenore inexplicably turning blue.

Sam watched with a kind of helpless dread as she sidled slowly in, his better instincts failing him utterly in the face of Jim’s brave new adoption policy.

*

Carol Marcus and Gary Mitchel had come as a matched set, the Master Mind and Shit-Stirrer. It was because of them that Sam had to start making rules, the kind that get written down, numbed and notarized.

Carol was the oldest, worldly and assured in the way only twelve-year- olds could pull off. She wasn’t a mitigating influence on Jim so much as a shrewdly efficient one, quietly disarming the surrounding alarms and paying off the witnesses as Gary smiled sly and whispered new mischief into Jim’s ear.

*

Thomas Leighton ambled in like he owned the place but was too polite to mention it.

Laconic and quick to laughter, Thomas’s presence seemed to round off the edges of Jim’s little tribe, filling the quiet Lenore’s bookishness tended to leave behind. Less tentative than Kevin, and more likely to fight Gary than Jim was, Thomas had been accepted with the ease of someone long expected.

*

It was Sgt. Fairbanks who first started calling them the Goonies. He had been covered in goo at the time, and his hair had never quite grown back, but his smile had been huge and his affection genuine. On a colony with fewer than sixty children under the age of ten, both the endearment and the nickname had stuck.

*

Sam has to add a new rule to the board: No particle accelerators in the house. Ever.

“To be fair, they probably shouldn’t have put a wall there.”

Sam can’t even believe this is his life some days.

*

Dr. Aurelian Swift, Chief Science Advisor of Tarsus IV, is weaving a tapestry of epic vitriol when Sam gets to the labs.

“No, no, no, wrong, wrong, wrong, when the smartest person in the room tells you, ‘Hey, don’t touch that, or you’ll die’, the *correct* response of *any* half-way intelligent life form is to _not touch the thing that will kill you_.”

The Security officer she’s yelling at is young. He has the soft, shell-shocked look of a new comer, the tips of his ears turning bright red as Aurelian shouts him. Sam figures he had to come fresh off the _USS Helena_. Part of the last wave of personnel and supplies before the _Helena_ leaves space dock. Tarsus won’t see her again for another eighteen months.

The kid makes his escape the moment Aurelian’s attention flickers to Sam, proving his sense of self-preservation isn’t _entirely_ lacking.

Sam takes a good look at Aurelian. Her clothes are wrinkled, the cuffs of her lab coat still stained with grease. Her usually neat up-do has given up the ghost, thin dreadlocks falling around her face, framing sleep-smudged eyes that are way too bright for this time of day.

“How many espressos have you had?”

Aurelian’s expression goes squirrely. “Two?”

Behind her Hillshire’s hand shoots up from behind a row of monitors, and wiggles four fingers. Aurelian whips around, snatches a half-eaten beef flavored MRE off a nearby console and throws it at him.

“Traitor!”

Hillshire retaliates, lofting a MRE of his own over the divide. Aurelian is hit, flails, grabs the offending bar, retracts her arm and -

“Teriyaki Chicken? Hillshire, you bastard! You’ve been holding out on me!”

Sam purses his lips. “I’m revoking all your coffee privileges.”

*

“The thing is,” Aurelian grumbles, cheek pressed to Sam’s shoulder blade, “I’m the boss.” Her arms snake around his waist, and she sort of nuzzles the fabric of his shirt. “ _You’re_ supposed to be the minion.”

It’s more or less true. Sam was supposed to be her lab assistant. The position was previously held and subsequently vacated by eight people before a harried Karidian administrator finally threw Sam at her.

He had stuck.

Sam’s officially registered as a lab technician, just another grunt with the added benefit of being the human shield between Aurelian’s staggering lack of social skills and the rest of Tarsus. But that’s not his job.

It’s so much more than that.

It's spiky knots of pain between his shoulder blades and in his wrists. It’s endless, electric-bright nights spent crouched under consoles and containment units. His mornings fueled by stale coffee and small catastrophes. Sam and whoever’s still standing fighting their way through programming code for hard-tick processors. Bastardizing Brunali tech and Vulcan hand-me-downs with improvised Terran fabrications while Aurelian curses the complete and utter _brain damage_ of Fleet engineers.

Working in the lab is calamity teetering on disaster, with three new terrifying near-death experiences popping up for every one crisis averted.

His hands ache with perpetual electrical burns, and his left palm is silver-pink with a starburst of scar tissue where he cut himself with the Hyperspanner. Sam doesn’t sleep enough, or shower enough. On bad days, if he stands still for too long he gets nauseous, and the world gets grainy around the edges.

But he loves it. He loves it.

Sam smiles to himself, and listens to Aurelian’s grumpy mumbling give way to soft, slightly congested snoring. He works pretty well like that, arguing with the server’s fail-safe protocol while Aurelian sleeps propped up against his back.

Her weight is easy to bear.

*

Every now and then Sam dreams he’s back in Riverside. He dreams of being seated at the kitchen table, watching the hazy yellow light spill in from the window, pouring onto the floor as his heart jackknifes in his chest, his tongue swollen with fear as the light slides closer, crawling across the table, the sick and sour light hungry for his hands.

Sam always wakes up before it touches him.

*

Peering out over the lab is a pane of milky glass, a one-way observation deck where heavy shadows pass and stand sentry.

It makes Sam nervous.

*

When the count-down on the simulator hits double-digits Hillshire abandons all pretense of civility and just starts eating dry coffee grounds from their tiny foil packets by the handful.

*

When they sleep, they sleep in the labs, curled around each other in the dark as Aurelian whispers to Sam about dead planets in bloom, aggregates of matter rewritten with life.

*

When the bio-grid goes live Aurelian’s hand finds Sam’s. They stand there, fingers threaded as the monitors flicker with data Sam can’t quite see beyond the blur of exhausted tears.

*

Sam forces himself to go home around three in the morning, dead on his feet and fucking _wired_ , like every molecule in his body is vibrating with hooligan mischief, making noise and causing trouble.

The living room is wrecked, littered with curling wire, circuit boards and hand tools; clear signs of unprovoked acts of engineering having been committed. Sam picks his way through on rubbery legs. The Goonies are draped across the furniture in snoring heaps of delinquency. Sam gingerly rights a couple of dangling limbs as he makes his way to Jim.

Jim’s awake and sprawled on the floor, humming in that funny off-tune way he has, all lurching notes and fumbling octaves. The wave of attachment that comes over Sam makes him feel warm and ridiculous in equal measure.

He plops down to the floor beside Jim, and Jim immediately scoots himself up under Sam's arm. Settled, Sam absently cards his fingers through Jim's hair (he needs a haircut) and watches star systems flash across the ceiling as Jim rapidly flips through perspectives.

Sam squints at the data feed. It's real-time, not pre–rendered. Jim hacked Tarsus IV's sub-space broadcast signal.

Sam feels his eyebrows arch. "Code-picker?"

Jim hums a distracted affirmative, like criminal breaches of Federation servers are no more impressive to him than loading porn on a padd. Eventually, he finds what he’s looking for and an unimpressive swath of space blinks quietly across the ceiling. Sam wonders just what’s on the ceiling that Jim couldn’t get standing out on the roof.

"What are we looking at, buddy?"

"Mom."

The _USS Kahlotus_ is nothing but a small pearl of light above them, one bright pin-prick among many, anonymous and beguiling in its homey clutch of stars.

Jim cranes his head back to look at Sam. "Are you still mad at her, Sammy?"

The weight in his chest suggests he's not up for this, but he’s too loose with exhaustion to try and evade it, either.

"Yeah," he finally says. "But differently than I used to be."

"How?"

"I'm not sure,” he lies. Sam can’t put this part into words, in a way Jim will understand. He’s brilliant, and harder in some ways than kids his age ought to be, but all the really important parts of him are still very _young_. Sam can't tell him that if you hate someone long enough, it stops being the most important part of your day.

"She left," is what Sam settles on, because it’s true.

"She didn't leave _me_." Jim fidgets with a nearby bit of wire. "To leave someone you gotta be there first."

Sam shifts, tugs and pulls until they're both on their sides, so that he can put both hands on Jim's face and look him straight on. "She does love us, buddy. She loves you."

"But,” Jim whispers, licking his lips. “But it doesn't make us better, Sammy. It don't make us better people, loving each other."

Sam presses their foreheads together and stays like that for a while. "It might make us even, though,” he whispers. “If we're happy."

"Yeah?"

Stars wobble above Sam, celestial bodies crashing across the wine-dark sea of space, oblivious. Deaf to drama and destiny. Somewhere, Winona Kirk is happy, if a little mournful. Unsure of her wayward heart the way she never is of machines and the strength in her hands.

Sam is still angry, and maybe always will be, but he’s also completely, impossibly, happy.

"Yeah."

*

Sometime in the night they shift on the floor, Jim pressing his forehead to the back of Sam’s neck, murmuring softly to himself about schemes and daydreams until his words slur and slip off into sleep.

Sam sleeps pretty well that way.

*

It all happens very fast after that.

*

Tarsus rots, a greasy pestilence oozing from the very ground, as if something deep inside bursts and there's nowhere for the foulness to go but up. Crops turn soft and black. Food spoils in wet lumps of sick yellow and acid green mold. White tufts of mildew gather in the corners of rooms and grey speckles of a nameless sickness bloom across the walls.

*

Sam and Hillshire destroy as much as they can as fast as they can, wiping the server as Aurelian wires an EMP bomb with broken fingers and whatever her genius brain can salvage from the mess on the floor.

The barred doors to the lab shiver, the staccato burst of gunfire beating out a countdown on the other side.

*

Hillshire’s face, as familiar to Sam as his own reflection in the mirror, splinters and bursts in a single clap of noise. His eyes bulge in their sockets, large and briefly comical, and then rupture.

*

The EMP detonator is slick with blood when Sam closes his hand around it.

*

Emergency shuttles are shot down, anti-aircraft fire creating a volley of burning metal in the sky.

*

They break down the door, polymer crunching, plastic snapping, and Sam holds on as tight as he can. Holds on until his vision goes red, crinkling at the edges with white fury.

Sam holds on to Jim as tight as he can, but they still take him.

*

 

  
The Compound is cloistered by security check points, biological identification scanners at every entrance. It's old technology, these biometrics, with their hungry needles and tiny scraping knives.

They can't be fooled, but they can be manipulated.

So can guards.

*

He finds Carol first, alone in a holding cell.

She smells like sweat and disinfectant. There’s a tuft of hair clenched in her tiny, white-knuckled hand.

*

Most Terran humans register as psi-null. But in truth, what's tested during screening is simply demonstrated ability, not dormancy, which sits in the full complement of human genetics like a cancer in remission. That's the mark the Eugenics Wars left on them: the disease of potential ribbed through their genes like a vein of cursed gold.

*

Kevin’s face contorts, and he mewls softly, hands scrabbling for Sam.

Sam holds him for as long as he dares.

*

All of the Goonies rank higher than average in their Esper, Aperception, and Duke-Heidelburg quotients.

*

Thomas cringes away from Sam when he breaks in again.

Thomas hides his face and curls up in a tight ball, refuses to speak or move. It takes Sam over an hour to gently draw him out of the corner. The doctors have already dressed it, but Sam lightly tips Thomas' head back, carefully inspecting the hole where his left eye should be.

“Okay,” he says, cradling Thomas in his lap, “okay, sweetheart.”

*

This is what Sam knows about the sessions:

What they do is not necessarily DNA resequencing.

What they do hurts.

What they do takes a very long time.

*

Gary and Carol are together. Blood beads at the seam of Carol’s fingernails pressed to his skin.

Sam’s hand hovers awkwardly over their folded limbs.

“If hurts if we don’t touch.”

*

When the ash comes it powders the colony in delicate, whisper-warm flecks of bone and cinder. Sam's people huddle, silent under the snow of the dead, the tops of their bent heads dusty with crumbling crowns.

*

Sam learns how to use a gun.

*

Jim, who's never been afraid of the dark or cowed by great heights; who's never met a dare he didn't immediately rush towards with blind, naked joy; who's never needed a better reason to throw himself off a cliff other than not having done it before; _Jim_ , who lives on the wild thrill of the unknown in a way Sam never has and never will -

“I'm scared.”

Sam can't control his face. He feels it cave under the sudden stab of gut-deep sadness. He can't control his face or the way he reaches for Jim, hands tense and stuttering with the need to wrap him up in the worthless protection of his arms, to hold Jim as close as he can.

“I know,” Sam says, “I know you are, buddy.”

( _“Sweetheart? Can you hear me?”_ )

Jim presses his face into the crook Sam's shoulder, and shakes. Makes a low, wrenching moan that hurts to hear. Sam gasps wetly and hitches him closer, his hot cheek pressed to the top of Jim's head, cradling him the way he used to when Jim was just a baby and needed to be held.

“I love you,” the low, strangled scratch of his own voice is a shock, more so than the hot prickle of tears.

In the quiet of his own selfish thoughts and cruel fantasies, Sam used to wonder if his father was a coward. Such an ugly, treacherous notion. A trespass so forbidden, so unforgivably bad it could only be taken out and looked at in the dark, Sam sweaty and nervous under his sheets as he rolled it over in his mind. He used to wonder with bold, jaw-clenching fury if it was courage at all, to stay on a burning bridge. To choose to die sitting down rather than running away. He used to wonder if Dad could have possibly loved Mom and Jimmy just _that goddamn much_ , or if it was simply the madness of surrender, the drunk thrill of giving up in the face of terrible odds, that allowed George to stay where he was and sound like he meant it when he said "I love you."

Sam knows now, that he did.

Sam presses dry kisses to Jim's hair and his sandpaper skin.

And knows he’s his father's son.

Save


End file.
